Operation Migration: Saving the Whooping Crane

Dan Lewis runs the popular daily newsletter Now I Know ("Learn Something New Every Day, By Email"). We've invited him to share some of his stories on mental_floss this week. To subscribe to his daily email, click here.

The whooping crane is an endangered bird native to North America. Before Europeans settled in the New World, there were an estimated 10,000 of them. By the late 1800s, that number fell to about 1500. In 1941, there were 23—two in captivity and just under two dozen in the wild.

Joe Duff wanted to fix that. To do so, he and his colleagues decided to dress up kind of like the whooping cranes they wanted to save.

Duff is the co-founder and CEO of a not-for-profit organization called Operation Migration. The whooping crane population is at risk mostly due to habitat loss—the areas they have been migrating to and from, for generations, have slowly been eroded away as people have moved in. Each subsequent generation of cranes learns the migratory path by following their parents and, unfortunately, the parents were going into a long-destroyed habitat; many did not survive the season. Without parents to guide them, the younger cranes were lost, and they, too, perished.

To combat this, Operation Migration uses a development from the 1980s and 1990s. A Canadian ultralight aircraft enthusiast named Bill Lishman—who would later become Duff’s co-founder—theorized that certain waterfowl could be trained to follow such a plane to a different migratory destination. In 1993, Lishman successfully led a group sixteen of Canada geese from Ontario to Virginia. Thirteen of the sixteen returned to Ontario the next year—without needing a human guide.

Lishman’s innovation centered on the fact that waterfowl, soon after their birth, imprint upon the first creature they see. Typically, this is their birth mother, but in a controlled environment, it could be basically any animal—including a person, if conditions are right. Duff, in an interview with NPR’s Talk of the Nation, explained: “Whooping cranes are hatched in the nest, in a marsh on the ground, basically, and they leave the nest almost immediately and follow their parents out to forage for food. And if they don’t follow their parents, they’re lost. So that natural instinct to imprint is there, and we just substitute parent for pilot and make sure they imprint on us.” The pilots wear the above-seen costumes so that the whooping cranes, when reintroduced to the wild, are not familiar with humans. Duff does not want them to learn that other people they come across are going to coddle and care for them because, simply, they won’t.

Once the cranes are able—assuming they’ve learned to follow the pilot—Operation Migration continues their conditioning, training them to follow the ultralight aircraft, as seen below.

According to an interview Duff did with VetStreet.com, there are now roughly 500 whooping cranes in the wild—a roughly 20-fold increase in just a few generations, although there is a long way to go. And there are unexpected problems along the way. As reported by the Sierra Club, toward the end of 2011 and into 2012, the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded Operation Migration’s aircraft due to an unclear rule requiring the organization to obtain a special waiver before they took flight again. They are working with the FAA on a permanent solution to allow the flights to go off without further problems.

Gopher or groundhog? (If you chose gopher, you're correct.)

iStock

Gophers and groundhogs. Groundhogs and gophers. They're both deceptively cuddly woodland rodents that scurry through underground tunnels and chow down on plants. But whether you're a nature nerd, a Golden Gophers football fan, or planning a pre-spring trip to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, you might want to know the difference between groundhogs and gophers.

Despite their similar appearances and burrowing habits, groundhogs and gophers don't have a whole lot in common—they don't even belong to the same family. For example, gophers belong to the family Geomyidae, a groupthat includes pocket gophers (sometimes referred to as "true" gophers), kangaroo rats, and pocket mice.

Groundhogs, meanwhile, are members of the Sciuridae (meaning shadow-tail) family and belong to the genus Marmota. Marmots are diurnal ground squirrels, Daniel Blumstein, a UCLA biologist and marmot expert, tells Mental Floss. "There are 15 species of marmot, and groundhogs are one of them," he explains.

Science aside, there are plenty of other visible differences between the two animals. Gophers, for example, have hairless tails, protruding yellow or brownish teeth, and fur-lined cheek pockets for storing food—all traits that make them different from groundhogs. The feet of gophers are often pink, while groundhogs have brown or black feet. And while the tiny gopher tends to weigh around two or so pounds, groundhogs can grow to around 13 pounds.

While both types of rodent eat mostly vegetation, gophers prefer roots and tubers (much to the dismay of gardeners trying to plant new specimens), while groundhogs like vegetation and fruits. This means that the former animals rarely emerge from their burrows, while the latter are more commonly seen out and about.

Groundhogs "have burrows underground they use for safety, and they hibernate in their burrows," Blumstein says. "They're active during the day above ground, eating a variety of plants and running back to their burrows to safety. If it's too hot, they'll go back into their burrow. If the weather gets crappy, they'll go back into their burrow during the day as well."

But that doesn't necessarily mean that gophers are the more reclusive of the two, as groundhogs famously hibernate during the winter. Gophers, on the other hand, remain active—and wreck lawns—year-round.

"What's really interesting is if you go to a place where there's gophers, in the spring, what you'll see are what is called eskers," or winding mounds of soil, Blumstein says [PDF]. "Basically, they dig all winter long through the earth, but then they tunnel through snow, and they leave dirt in these snow tunnels."

If all this rodent talk has you now thinking about woodchucks and other woodland creatures, know that groundhogs have plenty of nicknames, including "whistle-pig" and "woodchuck," while the only nicknames for gophers appear to be bitter monikers coined by Wisconsin Badgers fans.

Every year, the 45 million or so red crabs on the remote Australian territory of Christmas Island migrate en masse from their forest burrows down to the ocean to mate, and so the female crabs can release their eggs into the sea to hatch. The migration starts during the fall, and the number of crabs on the beach often peaks in December. This year, you don’t have to be on Christmas Island to witness the spectacular crustacean event, as New Atlas reports. You can see it on Google Street View.

Watching the sheer density of crabs scuttling across roads, boardwalks, and beaches is a rare visual treat. According to the Google blog, this year’s crabtacular finale is forecasted for December 16, and Parks Australia crab expert Alasdair Grigg will be there with the Street View Trekker to capture it. That is likely to be the day when crab populations on the beaches will be at their peak, giving you the best view of the action.

Google

Google Street View is already a repository for a number of armchair travel experiences. You can digitally explore remote locations in Antarctica, recreations of ancient cities, and even the International Space Station. You can essentially see the whole world without ever logging off your computer.

Sadly, because Street View isn’t live, you won’t be able to see the migration as it happens. The image collection won’t be available until sometime in early 2018. But it’ll be worth the wait, we promise. For a sneak preview, watch Parks Australia’s video of the 2012 event here.